includes the original novella
"Her Hunger"
by John Shirley

PROLOGUE

Silbido, California

She slept deeply but restlessly. Not quite eighteen years old, she twisted and moaned in a comfortable, prettily trimmed bed in a small dark, room with lace curtains on the single window. A single sharp-edged ray of yellow light shot through the room from the window, onto an upper corner of her bed. She breathed deeply, but irregularly; the darkness in her bedroom was breathing along with her. Groaning with her. The air close, warm, scented with her: clinging to her.

The dream shook her; made her undulate, and groan. "No... I don't want that. I don't want it... "

Her fingers, with nails painted the color of onyx, stretched out into the square of light projected onto her bed from the window -- stretched out, then clutched the comforter, digging at it. "No uh-uh -no!" Her back arching; her voice was distorted by the increasing thickness of the atmosphere in the dark room, as the other presence, arriving second by second, brought the density of its own hungry being to the very air...

Still asleep -- she sat up; she scrambled back, flailing, into a corner of the bed. "Don't!"

Something stirred in the shadows where nothing had been a moment before. Something took substance from the shadows themselves, as if drawing them on for a cloak of sheer black silk. Took form, and proportion...

The silhouette of a woman, tall and willowy. Approaching the bed.

Speaking. "It's all right. I'll take care of it. We'll do it together... "

A gentle hand, the color of moonlight, brushed the sleeping girl's hair; the girl's thrashing ebbed, her trembling eased, and she relaxed onto her side, fetal, clutching the pillow to her groin.